You can't keep traders from trading bitcoin. That doesn't mean bitcoin is unprincipled. It's in the whitepaper and the design of bitcoin. For example, the 21M btc supply limit. Bitcoin's design reflects a certain ideology about money.
>Bitcoin: by limiting issuance to 21M we have made price manipulation of our currency impossible
At what point did people claim that "price manipulation of [bitcoin]" was "impossible"? I think you're mistaking "price manipulation" with "dilution" (eg. quantitative easing or debasing).
Dilution is still possible either by forking it (and having normal non-Austrians accept the new one) or by starting lending programs (since banks create money by lending it.)
Technologies don't have principles, people who use them have principles; the people who buy and sell bitcoin are mostly the same as the other cryptocoins.
Satoshi intended certain principles with the creation of bitcoin, but these are not the predominant driver of its use in actuality.
Bitcoin really is defined by its principles. A fork that violates its principles (say, changing the 21M cap or violating the transaction history which hashes back to the genesis block) wouldn't be bitcoin, just like no amount of people believing the earth is flat would make it flat.
so by "principled" you just mean "has algorithmic constraints?"
that's not what most people mean by principled. Also, in that sense, crypto also has principles in that most altcoins are built on ethereum, which also has algorithmic constraints.
Bitcoin has principles the way most people mean the term. Ethereum does not. I've already given examples that make it clear.
Ethereum's algorithmic constraints are merely algorithmic constraints that can be changed easily, whereas bitcoin's key algorithmic constraints also are actually principles; changing them results in a non-bitcoin fork.
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